Today is also my blog's 12th anniversary. At 12 midnight Eastern Standard Time on January 1, 2006, my first blog post went up at TransGriot after nearly two months of persistent pushing from my homegirl Jordana LeSesne .
After expressing the sentiment in a November 2015 phone conversation with her that we needed a blog in the emerging blogosphere of the time that looked at issues from a Black trans perspective. Jordana's next words to me were "So when are you going to start it?"
She also stayed on my behind until she got me to commit a week later to a January start date for the blog I eventually named TransGriot
Griots in West African cultures are oral historians who are capable of reciting up to 500 years of their people's history from memory. And since some of what I do in this electronic space is record the history of Black transgender people across the African Diaspora
My mission statement came later.on January 2, 2011 and the logo debuted last year.
The TransGriot blog's mission is to become the griot of our community. I will introduce you to and talk about your African descended trans brothers and trans sisters across the Diaspora, reclaim and document our chocolate flavored trans history, speak truth to power, comment on the things that impact our trans community from an Afrocentric perspective and enlighten you about the general things that go on around me and in the communities that I am a member of.
There were only 124 posts in that first year because I was writing TransGriot the column for a local monthly TBLGQ paper in DaVille. I saw the blog as a realtime way to comment on the issues impacting the community. The blog over time became bigger than the newspaper column.And it has also become important to the trans community during the now 12 years I've been publishing posts as well.
And since this is an election year, I'll have plenty to say about a lot of subjects between now and November 6.
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